At last! Six years is a long time to wait between books in a series,
even for notoriously patient fantasy readers. In this case, the
continuing product is well worth the six years. Wizard and Glass
is the fourth book of "The Dark Tower," and in addition to continuing
the adventures of Roland and the ka-tet of Eddie, Susannah, Jake
and Oy, it gives anxious "Dark Tower" readers much of the backstory of the
stoic gunslinger's life.

Wizard and Glass opens in the Barony Coach of Blaine,
the mad monorail. Blaine hurtles on in a suicide run that will end with
the deaths of Roland and the others unless they can stump him in a game
of riddles. Roland's vast store of Fair Day riddles cannot save them;
neither can the book that Jake brought with him to Mid-World from his
New York City. It will be the cutup of the ka-tet, Eddie
Dean, who will defeat Blaine, with the very irreverence that Roland
so mistrusts. Beginning a journey on foot in a Kansas subtly
different from the one familiar to the three budding gunslingers drawn
by Roland, the party seeking the Dark Tower sees instead a tower of glass
sitting inarguably across the deserted interstate highway in the distance.
Before they reach it, Roland feels that he must tell the others of how
he came to be on this quest, of how he got started on the road that has
brought him to this point. They all settle in around a fire for a long
night of palaver to rival Roland's final meeting with the man in black.

Roland's tale begins with his defeat of his teacher, Cort, and with
Roland's father sending the new gunslinger east with his two closest
friends to keep the boy safe from Marten's deadly machinations. The
boys are sent off from Gilead to the backwater barony of Mejis, ostensibly
to count the taxable goods and property there. Their cover story is
that they are three boys who got into a mischief serious enough for their
fathers to send them on a busy-work mission of penitence. The boys
are expected to find nothing untoward, but they do. They find horses
in numbers greater than there ought to be, and crude oil in movable
tankers from before the world moved on -- all secretly meant for the
rebel forces of the Good Man, whose war threatens the future of the
entire world, of all worlds. And it is in Mejis that Roland
will meet Susan, the young woman whose love for him (and his for her)
will haunt him to the ends of the changing world.

It would be the greatest cruelty to reveal any more of the story to
those who have waited so long for this book. The greatest treat in
Wizard and Glass is that the bulk of the book is taken up
by Roland's story, which reads so much like traditional fantasy within
the more darkly fantastic scope of "The Dark Tower" in general. This
novel brings references that King readers have come to appreciate over
time, references made mostly to other of King's novels and stories,
most importantly to The Stand. Their are other archetypes
rising to the surface like precipitates of society's subconscious,
images from "The Wizard of Oz" chief among them. "The Dark Tower" is
without a doubt King's most ambitious work, a story that examines the
importance of mythology and questing for individual human beings. King
says in the book's afterword that he expects the series to include at
least three more books. That's a relief, considering how many he thought
it would take when he first started writing Roland's story in 1970.
Now all who avidly follow Roland's quest for the Dark Tower just have
to hope that it isn't quite so long before the journey once
again continues.